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A bill has been introduced in the Oregon House of Representatives that would give in-state tuition benefits to illegal aliens. The bill number is House Bill 2787. When you contact members of the legislature please refer to the bill number.

HB 2787 will have a hearing next Wednesday, February 13 at 8:00 am in Hearing Room D, State Capitol, before the House Higher Education Committee. WE URGE YOU to attend the Hearing; it is vital to have a sizable presence by opponents to the bill. Please be prepared to make a SHORT statement, or just attend to support our side. If you are unable to attend, please do not fail to call, email, or visit members of the committee listed below, and express your opposition. Giving in-state tuition to illegal aliens will give each a $20,000 per year benefit -- a benefit that would be denied to a U.S. citizen from another state.

HB 2787 is an attempt to diminish the value of American citizenship.

HB 2787 would reduce tuition revenue to the Oregon university system by millions of dollars a year and result in increased taxes to Oregonians.

HB 2787 would take places in our universities away from citizens as enrollment is necessarily limited by budgetary restraints.

A simple reading of HB 2787 mandates that only people who are illegally in country can qualify under this bill for in-state tuition rates.

Schools will be burdened with providing records for thousands of illegal alien students.

There is no ending date for benefits to illegal aliens in this bill. Would most voters support spending millions of tax dollars to give unlimited, unknown numbers of illegal aliens places in our colleges in competition with citizen students? We don’t think so.

At a time when higher education is facing severe cuts in programs, and tuition fees are being raised for U.S. citizens, HB 2787 makes no sense. Legislators should be looking for ways to discourage illegal immigration, not reward it.

These are the final results of the Statesman Journal’s online poll yesterday. Results were printed in the hardcopy edition of the newspaper today, January 28, 2013. The paper’s practice is to give results in the print edition the day after each poll closes, and results are not posted online after the poll has closed.

Statesman Journal, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, p.5C (editorial page)

POLL RESULTS TO YESTERDAY’S QUESTION

Should immigrants in Oregon be allowed to pay in-state college tuition if they met these conditions?

- 3 years in Oregon high school

- Graduation from Oregon High school

- Admission to a state university

- Actively working toward U.S. citizenship

Yes 31.5%

No 66.6%

Don’t Know 1.4%

Don’t Care 0.5%

---------------------------------

Several OFIR members objected to the wording of the question, which omitted the word “illegal” in referring to immigrants. In the context of the paper’s recent coverage of immigration issues, it is reasonable to assume the question meant illegal immigrants, and most viewers read the question that way. Of course the question should have been made clear to all by specifically referring to illegal immigrants, not just “immigrants.”

Rick LaMountain, once again hits the nail on the head with his decisive, clear and well documented letter explaining why the upcoming Oregon Legislature should not restore driver's licenses to illegal aliens in our state. Please, pass this article along to your Legislator so that they, too, can understand the folly of the idea.

David Olen Cross tracks and reports criminal alien activity throughout the state and has done so for years. It's not surprising that he holds accountable those that would pick and choose which information to include in the recent Oregon Commission on Public Safety’s final report to the governor, submitted on December 17, 2012.

How convenient to exclude the most damning information when the Governor's agenda is clear to anyone who cares to look at it.

One of OFIR's founders and the current Communications Director of OFIR, Jim Ludwick wrote a great Op-Ed about why our Legislators should be looking at ways to discourage illegal immigration instead of finding even more ways to accommodate illegal aliens in our state and invite even more to come here.

A seven-month investigation into a methamphetamine drug ring led to 11 arrests and the seizure of more than $130,000 of drugs Wednesday morning in Polk County.

About 4 a.m. Oregon State Police SWAT and a Polk County Special Response team served search warrants at three residences in Independence.

Polk County Sheriff Bob Wolfe said the morning bust went “like clockwork.”

“The best thing that happened was nobody got hurt — no suspects, no officers,” Wolfe said.

According to Independence police, one of more than a dozen agencies to participate in Wednesday’s search, the investigation began with undercover drug buys from suspects in July 2012.

A development in the investigation occurred Dec. 8, 2012, when law enforcement conducted a traffic stop of a drug transport vehicle in Douglas County enroute to Polk County based on information gained during the investigation.

Officials seized 6.5 pounds of methamphetamine, one pound of heroin and one pound of unidentified powder from the vehicle, which contained two suspects: Sergio Gustavo Pineda-Villanueva, 23, and Faliciano Ayala-Cardenas, 31.

Both men were arrested and taken to the Douglas County jail, where they have Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds.

Pineda-Villanueva was charged with racketeering, distribution of a controlled substance — methamphetamine and distribution of a controlled substance — heroin. His bail was set at $200,000. Ayala-Cardenas was arrested on the same charges and his bail was set at $100,000.

Officials learned that suspects may have been armed and some had histories of violent behavior, but no one was injured when SWAT and the special response team searched the residences, which were at side-by-side houses at 1145 and 1135 Monmouth Street, and an apartment complex at 1050 E Street.

“The city of Independence has received complaints from the general neighborhood — there is a lot of activity there,” Wolfe said of the residences. “They have spent a lot of time fixing this house up and making it look nice, but the fact that there are lots of vehicles coming and going, those sorts of things are always triggers for us.”

Officers also seized two firearms, computers, 12.9 grams of methamphetamine and three vehicles, including a GMC Yukon, a Jeep Cherokee and a Jaguar. The estimated street value of all the drugs seized during the operation is $120,000 in methamphetamine and $19,000 in heroin.

Four children were taken into protective custody and will be placed in foster care, said Independence police.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement in the last fiscal year than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report on the government's enforcement efforts from a Washington think tank.

The report on Monday from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan group focused on global immigration issues, said in the 2012 budget year that ended in September the government spent about $18 billion on immigration enforcement programs run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US-Visit program, and Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol. Immigration enforcement topped the combined budgets of the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Secret Service by about $3.6 billion dollars, the report's authors said.

Since then-President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 — which legalized more than 3 million illegal immigrants and overhauled immigration laws — the government has spent more than $187 billion on immigration enforcement. According to the report, "Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery," federal immigration-related criminal prosecutions also outnumber cases generated by the Justice Department.

The 182-page report concludes that the Obama administration has made immigration its highest law enforcement priority.

"Today, immigration enforcement can be seen as the federal government's highest criminal law enforcement priority, judged on the basis of budget allocations, enforcement actions and case volumes," MPI Senior Fellow Doris Meissner, a co-author of the report, said in a statement released with the report.

Critics are likely to bristle over its findings, especially those who have accused the administration of being soft on immigration violators.

"There has been some progress," said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul of Texas. "But the bottom line is that we are far from having operational control of our borders, particularly the Southwest border, and there are no metrics to quantify progress."

Meissner said since the 1986 law was passed, immigration enforcement "is a story of growth. The sum of its parts is growth."

Demetrios Papademetriou, MPI's president, said that the authors reviewed immigration enforcement policies and spending from 1986 on amid ongoing disagreements in Congress on whether border security and enforcement efforts needed to be solidified before reform could be tackled.

"No nation anywhere in the world has been as determined, has made as deep and expensive a commitment to or has had as deep a reach in its enforcement efforts as the U.S. has had," Papademetriou said. "The reach spans from local court rooms and jails all the way to the ability of goods and travelers to the United States to actually be able to travel to the United States."

According to federal budgets reviewed by MPI, CBP spent about $11.7 billion on its enforcement operations while ICE had a budget of about $5.9 billion in 2012. US-Visit accounted for about $307 million.

As spending has risen in recent years, the number of arrests at the border has steadily dropped. In 2011, agents made about 327,000 arrests at the southern border, the fewest in nearly 40 years. The Homeland Security Department also removed a record 396,906 immigrants that year. In 2012, nearly 410,000 people were removed from the United States.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has repeatedly touted those statistics as evidence that the border is now more secure than ever.

Experts have attributed the drop in arrests to a combination of factors, including record numbers of Border Patrol agents stationed along the Mexican border. Meissner said that the growth of illegal immigration in the U.S. is now at a standstill.

The report also highlighted workplace enforcement changes from raids targeting illegal immigrants to paperwork audits designed to root out employers who routinely hire illegal immigrant workers and the volume of people removed annually.

The report by MPI's Meissner, Muzaffar Chishti, Donald Kerwin and Claire Bergeron, comes amid renewed interest in immigration reform from Congress and the White House. In the immediate aftermath of the November election, congressional Republicans suggested the time was right to begin reform talks anew. President Barack Obama, who won a record share of Hispanic voters, renewed a previous pledge to make immigration reform a priority.

In the lead up to the election, Obama made several administrative changes to the immigration system, including launching a program to allow some young illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and work legally in the country for up to two years. His administration also refocused enforcement efforts to target criminal immigrants and those who posed a security threat. And just last week, the administration announced a rule change to allow some illegal immigrant spouses and children of U.S. citizens to stay in the country while they ask the government to waive 3- or 10-year bans on returning to the United States. Immigrants who win the waiver will still need to leave the country to complete visa paperwork, but will be able to leave without fear of being barred from returning to their families for up to a decade. The rule, first proposed last year, goes into effect in March.

Republican lawmakers have widely criticized the policy changes, routinely describing them as "backdoor amnesty." Many of those same lawmakers have said the border needs to be secured before reform can be taken up.